Print advertising does not need to beat digital on targeting, scale or measurement to become more valuable to marketers. Its opportunity lies somewhere more interesting: offering consumers a different kind of advertising experience at precisely the moment the digital one is becoming exhausting.
Tech
YouTube’s decision to count a view as soon as playback begins brings it closer to TikTok and Instagram, but the bigger consequence may be the final erosion of the view count as a meaningful measure of creator performance.
As AI search reshapes how people discover products, YouTube has quietly become one of its most trusted sources. Brands still treating the platform as a place to upload commercials are missing the much bigger opportunity.
Google may have abandoned its plan to kill the third-party cookie, but the forces making identifier-based advertising less reliable never went away. The smarter question is no longer when cookies disappear, but why marketers are still building around them.
Supply Path Optimization improved efficiency across programmatic advertising, but its greatest legacy may be revealing a much larger opportunity. As AI transforms media buying, the competitive advantage will shift from optimizing supply paths to understanding the value of every decision made throughout the campaign.
Rich Communication Services (RCS) technology itself is impressive, but the larger shift is that commerce is steadily moving into conversations, making messaging one of the most important battlegrounds in the future of customer experience.
AI is supposed to help people discover what matters. If it keeps reinforcing yesterday’s sports hierarchy, marketers investing in women’s sports could find themselves fighting the algorithm instead of reaching the audience.
The next arms race in advertising won’t be fought over who hires the most creatives or opens the largest Cannes beach. It will be fought over who owns the technology that powers the future of marketing.
The resurgence of vinyl records, CDs, film cameras, and printed books isn’t really about nostalgia. It’s a reaction to digital abundance and a reminder that convenience isn’t always the same thing as value.
The future of marketing will be shaped by technology. The brands that win, however, will be the ones that remember technology was never the point. People were.